change

Everything That’s Old

Jets are the new motorhomes
chemtrails are the new clouds
the unknown dead on an island
are the calm before a storm
robots are the new immigrants
Roundup is the new hoe
Colbert is the new Cronkite
smoke is the new sky
drought is the new summer
cars are heart disease
dust is lawn
downtown is the new homeless
Amazon, the new mall
retired is the new nomad
needles are the new rusty nails
plastic, the new lead
viral, the new headline
posting is the new protest
the horizon of the western ocean
is the new ghost of Godzilla
the Cold War is the new Cold War
fire heading down a suburban street
is wind
anxiety is the new air
the Earth’s crust is the weak eggshell
of a songbird.

Originally published in Rattle

Terrapin Was

by Luke Wallin

Back in my hunting days, bobcats caught turtles and

brought them out of the swamp, up onto the raised bed of the

wood-train railroad, to eat them. They’d leave the shells

between the rails. Trains passed over, redneck poachers and

country boys walking the line passed them by. Coyotes deigned

to pick them up for play. Months later, bleached a sacred white

by the sun, Mr. Luke would come along and grab them up.

My yankee friend Mr. Tom and I would compete to

find the best ones, up on the tracks or down in the woods.

This one I scratched up out of my mind, no photo or model,

just marks on the iPad which coulda been a star system,

coulda been a candle, but which became for me a meaning trail,

old time symbol for Indians and boys, those millions of years

surviving, tales of my grandfather’s logging camp where Bob Red,

half Chickasaw half Black cook made turtle soup for the men. Not just the past.

This turtle speaks to me from the future, its afterlife as a shell, shimmering

with power. A voodoo thing, a boy’s treasure, a glory vouched safe in eternity,

accomplishment out of the primeval gas of intergalactic star formation, and

shout out to me, hey old man, back there still living, you ain’t touched nothing yet.

Editor’s Notes

by Heidi Varian

Change CHānj/noun

the act or instance of making or becoming different.

Change: what is normal and what is not?

Climate and extreme weather. Sea levels. Melting polar ice caps. Disappearing species and jungles and islands. The planet is changing at an accelerating pace. And those changes are driving a divisiveness of social convention unlike anything we have seen in the United States and around the world. We are in a period of great change across the globe affecting economies and social order. Widening income inequality. Brexit. The wild stock market. Gender relations. Race and culture. Standards of truth and behavior. The second Women’s March protesting this not-normal presidency came and went, as well as #MeToo, and March for our Lives, our children challenging our status quo. Each day, people check social media to see if the next change will be worse than the last. Change is natural and inevitable. But there has been a paradigm shift in this 242-year-old democracy. The past year, it seems like there is an alarm bell going off somewhere to which we should be paying attention.

But people are educating themselves about issues, creating grassroots movements of resistance, and being aware about environmental policies because we recognize that we have to stand up so that we have a future.

For this issue, we sought poetry, stories, and essays that recognize and respond to how change—personal, societal, environmental, global—is affecting our perceptions and worldview. We sought writing that starts a conversation about this new world order as we are coming to know it.

There is a love letter to America from an angry patriot, a philosophical treatise that challenges us to reach back into the long dim past of the Roman Empire to address a new societal paradigm, poetry that entices the reader to introspection, short fiction that inspires intimate evaluation, and essays that test boundaries, both literally and figuratively. The authors appreciate your comments, so create a free Sisyphus User ID and keep the conversation going.

Shelter

by Michael Lauchlan

…it is only the light/that we keep feeling a need to account for
W.S. Merwin, “The Marfa Lights”

A forgotten goddess spits
her rage at our doors. Again,
it’s snowing. We’ve begun,

around the room, to unroll
tales of luck no one begs
from dice. A tall girl

with purple hair has folded
into a chair. A gray man
awaits a court date.

When we go where they
have to take us in and they
won’t, we drift here.

We crave a night out
of the wind or some release
from our wanting ways.

We claim a corner of the couch
or a spot on the floor. A phone chirps,
feet scuttle, and a voice pleads.

Then our breathing reasserts
its loud, wordless request
and all the portals groan.

Fear in a Handful Of

by Nick Dickson

To me, this is just a nice little piece about people never changing their roles, even as they dream of doing so, because they think they aren’t capable or because they are afraid.

A solitary particle of dust sat on a lonely street corner in the shadow of a building one early afternoon and wept. It looked from one end of the street to the other and could see nothing and no one and its sobs bounced off the walls of the empty banks and dry saloons.

“What’s up, buddy?” said a voice from above. The lonely particle of dust looked up and saw a small dust mote floating on the warmer air in a shaft of sunlight.

“I can’t stand it anymore!” cried Particle to Mote. “I have dreams of being more than just this. If I could find away to cover a fine plate in a fancy cupboard or film over a stained glass window in a church, I would be happy.”

Mote landed softly a few inches from the solitary particle and said, “Really? Just a covering for a dish? I have bigger dreams than that! Imagine! I might one day be the grit that makes the keystone stick. Watches and clocks would pass all time with me on their face! Our legions could blot out the sun! Even if I only fill a pothole in a busy road . . . all that potential — right? Along comes the wheel of a cart and boom! I’m all aloft again and on to the next thing.”

A rapid thudding vibrated through the still air and boardwalk, causing Particle and Mote to shift slightly and look for the sound. At the far end of the street, flying towards their corner, a horse and rider thundered along the dirt road. The rider wore dusty grey clothes and a big black hat with a ring of coins set around the hatband. His horse was a quick brown and white steed. Behind them in hot pursuit were a half dozen more riders, whose approach was like the pounding of a thousand mallets on a thousand stakes. All those horses were blindingly white in the sunlight and, on the chests of the riders, sharp brass stars flashed as they bounced and jostled at gallop.

As Particle and Mote watched, the fleeing rider twisted in his saddle, ripping a large revolver from its holster in a fluid, practiced movement. He fired three shots at his pursuers. One of the lawmen grabbed at his stomach and slid from his saddle mid-stride, slamming into the road to lie crumpled in the dirt near the corner. Immediately shots were returned, and the dust heard ricochet-whine echoes between the building facades. Particle and Mote were knocked backward by the buffeting wind of the passing horses still in pursuit of the fleeing rider, and as the final horse rounded the corner, a chunk of road thrown from the hooves flew high into the air and skipped along the dusty boardwalk to rest near Particle and Mote.

“Whew!” exclaimed Mote. “Do you see what I mean?! Look at that! I can’t wait to fill a pothole or maybe to line the ruts of wheel tracks! What a life!”

The chunk of road dirt grunted. “Don’t get too worked up about road life, little dude. What’re your names?” Particle stayed very still and realized he didn’t have one.

Mote said, “What’s it to you?”

The dirt chuckled. “Don’t matter,” it said. “I’m Clod.”

Particle couldn’t speak, so Mote did.

“Clod, what do you dream about being?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” the dirt clod cracked and shifted a little. “Tell you the truth, I dreamed about being enough for a landfill. Imagine being enough to extend the land in any direction. To make water get outta your way, to make a difference! Yeah. I heard y’all talking. Earlier. Before the excitement.”

“Yeah!” Mote shouted. “That was something!”

“Whoa, there. Why, I been waiting in that road for nearly ten years and that’s the first piece of action I’ve seen ever. And lookit. S’all gone and over in a few seconds.”

At that moment, they heard a coughing and gurgling from down on the road. A blood- coated hand scraped upwards from the gutter. Blood dripped from the fingertips. And as the marshal struggled to drag himself away from his death, his grasping fingers left five streaks of blood in a zigzag pattern that terminated at the edge of the boardwalk. Clod, Particle, and the Mote counted the seconds afterwards by watching the movement of the building’s shadow as it drifted away from the sun. When the shadow had crept over all of them and crouched over the dead man too, Particle spoke.

“That’s what I hate,” it said. “The world goes and goes. I wish something would happen.”